Tingo Group is a Nigerian agri-fintech company. The US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) has accused the company of “massive fraud,” claiming that nearly every aspect of the business, including its partners and financials, was falsified. Tingo Group, its founder Dozy Mmobuosi, and other important companies were allegedly involved in a multi-year plot by the SEC to inflate financial performance measures and mislead investors worldwide. Due to allegations that Mmobuosi falsified financial statements and other paperwork for the companies implicated in the fraud, the SEC was granted a temporary asset freeze and restraining order against him. The accusations come after short seller Hindenburg Research’s previous reports raising doubts about the legitimacy of Tingo Group. The Nigerian bank accounts of Tingo Mobile, a subsidiary of Tingo Group, showed a cash and cash equivalent balance of $461.7 million as of March 2023, according to the company’s fiscal year 2022 Form 10-K. In actuality, as of the close of the fiscal year 2022, the cumulative balance of those identical bank accounts was purportedly less than $50. The SEC said that the defendants had “also fabricated the customer relationships that formed the basis of their purported businesses.” “Through these schemes, Mobuosi and the entities under his control have fraudulently obtained hundreds of millions of dollars in cash or property.” “As alleged, Mmobuosi spearheaded a brazen scheme using phony records and fictitious entities to make the Tingo companies he controlled appear highly profitable, so that he could hoodwink investors and reap massive benefits at their expense,” said Antonia M. Apps, Regional Director of the SEC’s New York Regional Office. In order to protect investors from more harm and to expose Mmobuosi’s fraud, we filed this emergency action. Nathan Anderson of Hindenburg reported that Tingo received a clean audit opinion for 2022 from Deloitte Israel, which expressed interest in collaborating with the company for 2023. For a Big 4 firm, he described it as a “astonishing audit failure.” Hindenburg concluded their June report with the following statement: “We believe Tingo is a worthless and brazen fraud that should serve as a humiliating embarrassment for all involved.” Shortly after, Tingo retorted that there was a lot of “misleading and libellous content” in the Hindenburg report.
